Culture regained: Situated and compound image schemas

Abstract

The hallmark of a genuinely socio-cultural perspective on image schemas must be its ability to account for their variation both across cultures and in situated cognition. To counterbalance the prevalent research strategies which have highlighted highly generic cognitive resources that cross-cut a broad range of different contexts, I propose two complementary analytical strategies that make nuances in image schema usage more visible: The first lies in focusing more on how image schemas interact at the level of whole scenes, at which they form compound gestalts – a step allowing the analyst to get a handle on complex tropes. The second lies in evading the practice of endowing image schemas with a maximally decontextualized ontology – a step opening an avenue to augmented descriptions of image schemas and their context-bound usage. This analytical strategy produces “situated image schemas”, descriptions capturing how “primitive” image schemas are actualized with regard to the kind of embodiment they involve, as well as their intentional, emotional and motivational nature within specific settings, or their embedding within wider action scenarios and even a cultural ethos.

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